November 5, 2013
Someone left a paperback book, The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology by John Malcolm Brinnin, photographs by Rollie McKenna, in the "Swap Area" here --the shelves in the basement of my apartment building where neighbors leave whatever they think is still usable and no longer wish to keep. The book was published in 1963, so the modern poets compiled inside are no longer that: indeed, many of them are the magisterial figures of twentieth century poetry, while others mere attendants on them.
Had the book not contained McKenna's excellent and revealing photographs, it probably would not have had such a hold on me, but seeing the faces of so many of my literary gods brought back my six years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971 to 1977. At Harvard then were, among the poets included in The Modern Poets, Robert Lowell, whom I remember shuffling along Massachusetts Avenue, long grey hair askew, black glasses not quite balanced on his face, shabby brown overcoat thrown over similarly drab trousers and shirt, face abstracted. Elizabeth Bishop, too, shutting between Cambridge and Brazil; and Anthony Hecht, the formalist poet whom I interviewed for The Harvard Independent, the weekly newspaper for which I was the Book Editor.
What happened to the love of poetry? True, unlike the English schools, where schoolboys learned to distinguish hexameters from alexandrines and iambic pentameter, memorizing whole poems like "Invictus" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade", the American approach was less formal, but no less passionate. Evening poetry readings at the coffeehouse behind the Harvard Coop were packed, particularly when "feminist" poets --Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich-- read. In 1972 Rich made waves when she walked out of the Signet Society Christmas dinner in protest after a speaker at the dinner regaled the audience with tales of his visit to a Boston burlesque show in the company of the literary society's steward. Rich, a protégé of W.H. Auden, refused to deliver a reading in what she termed a "male dominated institution".
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton published poems and killed themselves. W.H. Auden was still alive in 1972 --he died the next year. So was Ezra Pound --at least until All Saint's Day, when he died. John Berryman died January 7 of that year. Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell died in the 1960s. Alan Ginsberg died in 1997. Galway Kinnell is still alive. T.S. Eliot never died, being apotheosized by Prufrock, which Pound edited.
Also included in The Modern Poets is Robert Fitzgerald, best known for his translations of The Illiad and The Odyssey. Fitzgerald was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, a plum position there in which he succeeded another poet and diplomat, Archibald MacLeish.
As part of his duties, Fitzgerald organized the Boylston Prize competition, a prize in elocution given "for the delivery of memorized selections from English, Greek, or Latin literature" not to exceed five minutes in length. The competition took place on two days over two weeks, with the only qualification being delivery to the English department of the selection to be declaimed by the undergraduate. The first day was grueling, as the judges --representing the cloth, the bar and education, as stipulated in the original grant for the prize -- had to sit there and hear all comers. The undergraduate who gave the most outstanding recitation of a poem or a passage of dramatic verse won $175 and had his photograph taken for The Crimson. The second prize was $100. I don't know what the judges got.
I competed for the prize, offering as my selection Juliet's last monologue, Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. I was standing in the middle of the stage in Boylston Hall when I began speaking my piece, Fitzgerald sitting to the side, bespectacled. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man in his sixties, with longish grey hair framing a strong, eagle-eyed face. I don't remember noticing anyone else among the judges. Perhaps they only judged the finalists Fitzgerald selected, my memory fails me.
I started out confidently, but at some moment felt that something in my delivery was boring Fitzgerald. Whereupon shame and shyness seized me, hurtling me headlong and hound doggedly to the sorry end of my lines. I shambled offstage, wondering how had I dared waste the great translator's time.
The winners of the prize that year, 1976, were Felipe Noguera and Mira Nair. I don't know what happened to Noguera, but Nair went on to become an internationally famous filmmaker. Nair won with Jocasta's speech from Seneca's Oedipus, the speech which ends with her plunging the sword into her entrails. The translation from the Greek was that of Ted Hughes, but the bloodcurdling scream was Nair's.
My money was on Japes Emerson, a tall, slender, fair-skinned and brown-haired boy who acted in many Harvard productions. He wore his hair parted in the middle and over his ears, his long face accentuated by the style. He was elongated naturally: his blue blazer, dark polo shirt and jeans heightened the impression, and suited the delivery of his selection for the competition: Browning's My Last Duchess.
My Last Duchess is a monologue delivered by a Renaissance duke, whose young wife has recently died. He is showing the emissary of a family with a daughter to marry around his collection of art works when he stops before a portrait of the last duchess. In describing her, it becomes clear that the duke grew to hate his wife's gentle disposition. "She had a heart too soon made glad" he says, explaining why he killed her. Now he seeks her replacement by another young beauty, exchanging wives as easily as he would one of the art works in his collection. It is a piece that requires an actor to convey the aristocrat's coldness, but also his covetousness. It's funny, years later, I retained the memory of Emerson's performance, thinking he had taken second prize to Nair's first. It was only in checking the Harvard archives that I realized my mistake. Noguera, who declaimed The Meaning of the Fourth of July for Black People by Frederick Douglas, made no impression.
There were opportunities at Harvard to study poetry and to write it as well. I studied Milton with Herschel Baker, the dean of Milton studies. He, like Milton, was going blind, but he hadn't completely lost his sight: visiting him once in his office in the stacks of Widener Library, he called me a "comely Spanish beauty". A male classmate in the same class who had the impression Baker disliked him, used to refer to Baker's "gimlet eye" --a glance that fixed you. David Perkins let me devise an independent study around --Pound, writing during his "Imagist" phase, as well as Marianne Moore and others. With Zachary Leader (who went on to become the official biographer of Kingsley Amis, and now Saul Bellow), I studied the Metaphysical poets --Donne, Herbert and Marvell.
I even wrote some poetry. I only remember one poem I wrote, inspired by Personae, Pound's second book of poems, published in 1909. It has no title, but I will give it one now:
Poets in their youth
I think, when I am sixty
I'll be covered with scars.
Memories of cigarette burns linger
Tiny shadows, in the slip
Of fingers, idling, past their prime.
A friend in the hospital
Has the clearest skin:
Her mouth is like a poppy
Drying in the sun.
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